Michael Erlewine purchased a compact disc of early recordings by Little Richard only to discover it was a flaccid latter-day rehash, a discovery that sparked the creation of AllMusic. This moment of frustration in the early 1990s drove Erlewine to research metadata as a tool for organizing music, leading him to found All Music Guide in Big Rapids, Michigan, in 1990. Erlewine, described as a compulsive archivist, noted astrologer, Buddhist scholar, and musician, had previously founded a software company called Matrix in 1977 while exploring the use of computers for his astrological work. His goal was to create an open-access database that included every recording since Enrico Caruso gave the industry its first big boost. The first All Music Guide, published in 1992, was a massive 1,200-page reference book packaged with a CD-ROM, titled All Music Guide: The Best CDs, Albums & Tapes: The Expert's Guide to the Best Releases from Thousands of Artists in All Types of Music. This physical product laid the groundwork for what would become one of the most ambitious sites of the early-internet era.
Building The Digital Archive
The transition from a physical book to a digital platform required a team of dedicated professionals to bring Erlewine's vision to life. Vladimir Bogdanov, a database engineer, was hired to design the All Music Guide framework, while Erlewine recruited his nephew, writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine, to develop the editorial content. In 1993, Chris Woodstra joined the staff as an engineer, bringing an encyclopedic knowledge of music that made him a record geek with a background in alternative weeklies and fanzines. Together, they developed a list of 1,400 subgenres of music, a feature that became central to the site's utility. The first online version, launched in 1994, was a text-based Gopher site that moved to the World Wide Web as web browsers became more user-friendly. By February 1999, the site had cataloged 350,000 albums and two million tracks, while publishing biographies of 30,000 artists, 120,000 record reviews, and 300 essays written by a hybrid of historians, critics, and passionate collectors. The site's ability to track styles, genres, and subgenres, along with the tone of the music and the platforms on which it was sold, allowed it to intelligently tell users about entire types of music, from massive genres like classical to tiny ones like sadcore.The Business Of Music Data
In 1996, seeking to further develop its web-based businesses, Alliance Entertainment Corp. bought All Music from Erlewine for a reported $3.5 million, a transaction that saw Erlewine leave the company. Alliance filed for bankruptcy in 1999, and its assets were acquired by Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Equity Fund. The company relocated from Big Rapids to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1999, where the staff expanded from 12 to 100 people. In late 2007, AllMusic was purchased for $72 million by TiVo Corporation, known as Macrovision at the time of the sale, and as Rovi from 2009 until 2016. In 2012, AllMusic removed all of Bryan Adams' info from the site per a request from the artist, highlighting the tension between corporate ownership and artist control. In 2015, AllMusic was purchased by BlinkX, later known as RhythmOne, and the database is now powered by a combination of MySQL and MongoDB. These financial shifts reflect the volatile nature of the music industry and the value placed on curated data in the digital age.